Reference is made to commonly assigned copending patent application Ser. No. 09/575,354 filed herewith entitled xe2x80x9cA Method For Printing Electronic Ticketsxe2x80x9d in the name of Ronald P. Sansone, Ser. No. 09/573,364 filed herewith entitled xe2x80x9cA Method For Reading Electronic Ticketsxe2x80x9d in the name of Ronald P. Sansone; and Ser. No. 09/575,314 filed herewith entitled xe2x80x9cA Method For Automatically Reading Electronic Ticketsxe2x80x9d in the name of Ronald P. Sansone.
The subject invention relates to a method for issuing tickets at remote locations and, more particularly, to issuing tickets at remote locations that are difficult to be reproduced fraudulently.
Tickets such as concert, theater, movie, museum, trade show, airline and sports tickets, etc, are documents having a substantial, intrinsic value which typically may be presented by any bearer to gain admittance or exercise an entitlement. Since such tickets may have substantial cash value, there exists a continuing problem of preventing the issuance of fraudulent tickets.
The issuance of many types of tickets, such as theater tickets, is currently controlled by means of controlled supplies (e.g. serialized ticket stock, specially printed ticket stock, etc.) and by allowing tickets to be issued only by controlled, authorized issuers (e.g. ticket agents). Controlled supplies are expensive, difficult to control, and prone to theft or counterfeiting. Typically, one stood in line to purchase a ticket at the place the event was being held or purchased the ticket over the phone from an authorized ticket agent who mailed the ticket to the purchaser.
Currently, ticketing companies are giving purchasers the option of printing their electronic tickets at home, using ordinary paper, a personal computer printer and an Internet connection. One of the problems in allowing people to print tickets at home is to ensure that the tickets are not counterfeit. One of the solutions suggested to solve the foregoing problem is to print an encrypted bar code on the ticket. Unfortunately, a printed ticket on ordinary paper with an encrypted bar code can be photocopied and the seller of the ticket will be unable to distinguish between the original real ticket and the photocopied ticket.
This invention overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art by adding a graphic field to the electronic ticket. The graphic field is designed to produce a xe2x80x9ctellxe2x80x9d, a visible known image (a large number of detectable half-tone gray steps) when printed by a personal computer printer. Additionally, the graphic field will change in appearance when the ticket originally printed by the personal computer printer is digitally reproduced either by scanning or photocopying.
The digital scanning and photocopying processes are degrading ones that reduce the number of detectable half-tone gray steps produced in the copy. These processes also give rise to a pronounced mottle at the transition zone from white to black that does not exist in the original printed electronic ticket. The loss of some of the gray steps in the graphic field will indicate to an observer that the reproduced ticket is counterfeit.
This invention takes advantage of the fact that the human eye cannot resolve the individual spots in the intermediate gray zone that is somewhere between white and black. The human eye interprets the intermediate patch of adjacent spots in the gray zone as a particular shade of gray, when, in fact, the adjacent spots in the gray zone are black spots that vary in size due to process variations introduced by the photocopying and/or scanning processes. The human eye is very sensitive to slight changes of grayness in the intermediate gray zone region. The human eye is very sensitive to miniscule variations in the apparent grayness of the patch. Consequently, the human eye will be able to observe that the graphic field, or tell, on an electronic ticket will change in appearance when the ticket originally printed by the personal computer printer is either digitally reproduced by scanning or photocopied. Thus, the human eye will be able to determine when a copied electronic ticket is a fake ticket.